Text and tape presentation for the Independent Art School Conference, Hull, October 2000

Philip Barnes graduated from the Hull School of Art this summer. During his time there he was involved in the occupation of the nearby Red Gallery, as were between thirty and fifty other students and artists.

This was primarily intended as a 'work-in', and as a creative protest against new University regulations.

Curious (and optimistic) about the idea of 'liberated' zones for creative endeavour, he researched into student and artist actions of the 1960's.

The sixties may be regarded as the revolutionary era of student activism. Often when we talk of 'freedom' or 'change' our language bears some homage (or debt) to the period.

From this research he tried to come to an open-ended 'conclusion' in the 'prelude for a proposal for something else' (last page).

Tape presentation:

Student definitions

"Part of the rhetoric of student revolt was against a society based on mass production, yet higher education was primarily intended to train the managers of a technocratic society- the 'technical intelligentsia'…students in one way or another were destined to be the reproducers of the cultural values they inherited."

-Robert Hewison, Too Much (1986)

"When they [students] take up jobs in civil life, they are dispersed throughout the social structure…"

(On the transience and the uncertainty of the student situation.)

-Gareth Stedman Jones, Meaning of the Student Revolt (1969)

"Creative people are an elite set apart from society by their mysterious inner fire. While it is decent of society to provide somewhere for them to go- the art college- all they want to do there is burn away in peace…this 'superman' philosophy is associated with the defence of other traditionalist notions…Its most damaging aspect is the pseudo-revolutionary complacency that goes with it. That is, it usually contains the assumption that just by having become a would-be 'Artist' in this sense, grown hair, donned the appropriate garb, and so on, an effective revolt against the status quo has been carried out."

"The ethos of art colleges is part a fossilized old world, part the bitchy new one of the ad-man, the teenage glossy, the newest gimmick."

"Schools of art were thought of as remote hot-houses of the aesthetic spirit…they have become more crudely and directly linked to the demands of a certain kind of industry than any other part of the educational system."

-Tom Nairn/Jim Singh-Sandu, Chaos in the Art Colleges (1969)

"Comfortably housed, well fed, sometimes even waited on by feudal retainers, the undergraduates developed little or no corporate consciousness. The liberal philosophy of academic freedom and the non-vocational university united both teachers and taught in an abstract and unfettered quest for wisdom. The university was a community of gentlemen well versed in the arts of civilization."

(The 'traditional' idea of the University Undergraduate.)

"The vast majority of students […] enjoyed neither the privileges, the prestige or the educational advantages of a liberal education…they were condemned to the bleak waste land of a cheap and grindingly utilitarian higher education. The unalloyed input/output model of utilitarian education was concealed by blazers, communal drinking, debating clubs and a predominant atmosphere of philistinism."

-Gareth Stedman Jones

"The student is shit. He is the privileged person in an underprivileged world of suffering…The function of the student movement is not to make demands on the university, but to destroy the existence of the 'student' as a social role and as a character structure. YOU MUST DESTROY THE STUDENT WITHIN YOU."

-A Little Treatise on Dying, International Werewolf Conspiracy, circa 1968

Student Revolt

"There was a new sense of what was possible. Students had changed the way they thought about themselves, they were no longer people to whom things just happened. The appalling conformity and petty competitiveness which is the reality of undergraduate life had been momentarily shattered."

-The Left in Britain (1976)

"An open system whereby all individual demands can be taken into account…the curricula will be in a continual state of flux. […] Complete freedom of individual or group research at any time with or without tutorial assistance."

-statement of intent by Hornsey Art Students, 1969

"…a large-scale, despairful Happening…poised in the realm of the absurd."

-criticism of Art Student revolts, Chaos in the Art Colleges, 1969

Tactics

Call for a "plus-value not computable according to the accountancy of salaried work".

"The first step would be for a group of likeminded souls to withdraw from the city to an appropriate spot where we shall forment a kind of cultural jam session: out of this will evolve the prototype of our spontaneous university."

-Alexander Trocchi, Sigma Portfolio (1965)

New structures

"We must destroy the bastardised meanings of 'student', 'teacher' and 'course' …At the Antiuniversity many of the original and radical artists, activists and intellectuals of London as well as Europe, America and the third world will have a place to meet among themselves and others to discuss their ideas and work…we must do away with artificial splits and divisions between disciplines and art forms and between theory and action."

-Antiuniversity of London Manifesto, 1968

"Leon asked me to put down my ideas about a place…When I think now of a place […] I think of people, us people who are already involved…A place grows into the sort of place people want it to be, it then serves the needs of those people…The place must be strong…Good enough to take all the shit of all its people…It must always go on getting better- through the people already there, through everyone that ever sets foot in the place."

-Mary Barnes, Ideas about a place

Alternatives/terms of reference

"All subversive ideas are squeezed out by the corporate culture of television, radio, newspapers and mass-market paperbacks."

-Robert Hewison

"The fashionable critique of society ceased for a time to be economic and became sociological: its key terms were not poverty, exploitation or even crisis, but 'alienation' and 'bureacratization.'"

-E.Hobsbawn

"their [hippies'] self-contained lifestyle, with its emphasis on creativity and individual enjoyment, constituted a critique of the radical left."

-Paul Willis, Profane Culture, 1978

"Power for what? Just any old kind of power? The university is a clumsy and uncoordinated machine, engulfing and serving thousands of people. Do students want [the power] to be administrators?"

-Carl Davidson, Campaigning on the Campus, 1969

Sources

-Hewison, Robert: Too Much. Menthuen 1986.

 -Cockburn/Blackburn: Student Power. Penguin Special 1969.

-Stansill/Mairowitz: BAMF (By Any Means Necessary). Penguin 1971.

prelude for a proposal for something else

The authors of Chaos in the Art Colleges were sceptical of art students who announced, "Why don't we just get on with our work, man?"

Describing protests by art students as unfocussed, despairful and absurd, the essay suggests that artists were unable to identify strongly enough with the 'democratisation of education' and, more importantly, with general mass-struggle.

Yet might there not may be something just as creative, just as radical and as critical about society, in the art-for-art's sake attitude?

Not unlike the hippies, who were said to have a self-contained lifestyle of 'creativity and individual enjoyment', the standing-alone of artists, and the ideal of artistic communes, may not only constitute a critique of politics but may also be an active alternative.

Between '67 and '68 the Students Union campaigned at the London School of Economics for greater student representation: demands for more membership of committees and increased voting powers.

This, arguably, is our current understanding of the democratic process; of 'pious, wounded committees appealing to the auspices of a greater good or a greater power.' The ideal of such strategies is that by negotiating and cooperating with what in the 60's was often called 'the Man', a desirable change would take place.

Alternatively, one can take an aggressive approach. Flyers penned by groups such as the Motherfuckers and King Mob spoke of violent insurrection and of firearms. In our own time we have seen groups attempting to 'reclaim the streets', and confronting policemen and branches of McDonalds in protests against capitalism.

A cynic could describe these as 'apelike gestures of contempt from the sidelines of the dominant system.'

Both change-through-committee and street action can be associated with a two-edged relationship with our social structure; of wanting to alter it either by faithful perseverance or by the threat of violence.

Crudely speaking, the latter approach wants to punch the system in the face, whilst the former, with its endless meetings to 'get things done', wants to enter into mutual masturbation with it.

One critic of the political traits of the 'beat' generation decided that he found the Marxist slogans only one degree less nauseating than the Atom bomb itself. Student revolts likewise can conform to an uncreative agenda of sloganeering and antagonising the 'men in suits'.

*

From the Dutch Brotherhoods of the Renaissance to contemporary artist-run galleries and loft-sharing groups, a continual theme in artistic practice has been the twin action of retreat and of coming together: a retreat from the base commercial demands of the surrounding society, and the coming together with fellow artists.

An 'independent art school' could be many things: a piss-take, a media stunt, an exercise in filling in more grant application forms, a new committee, a place to get drunk, a place to slack off. One suspects that by postmodern 'spectacular' standards, all of these would qualify as success.

What an independent art school may be is a community for sharing, for analysing creative processes and intentions, an arena for critical experimentation.

Should an independent art school follow the 'democratic' model of seeking permission and approval? Should it expect or want official patronage? Could it stand alone, or would it be an institution-within-an-institution?

Shouldn't an independent art school be more creative than just a reaction to established authority, more than an 'apelike gesture of contempt'?

Does it have to be permanent? Could it run by shared labour and responsibility? Would it run 2, 3, 4 or more days (or nights) a week?

Could you turn a garage into an independent art school? Could you take charge of the buildings in which you work?

An independent art school ought to be a real place. Wouldn't it be up to artists to turn a real place into an independent art school- and wouldn't that have to be real soon?

© Philip Barnes, October 2000